Since search and recommendation systems can make the difference between users discovering content and never seeing it at all, recent papers have considered the ethical concerns of such retrieval systems. One consideration is whether the IR system is systematically under-representing certain types of content [1]}, [2]}, such as mostly showing male CEOs for the query “ceo”, under-representing female CEOs. Another consideration is that the IR system may not perform equally well for all groups of users, perhaps providing lower quality search results to some group [3]} because it is smaller and contributes less to the overall training data of the IR system.
